Burning for the Faith
The environment deserves serious policy. What it gets is liturgy: dogmas that admit no revision, sins purged by others, indulgences for those who pay, heretics banished from debate. When “global warming” was renamed “climate change,” the creed was sealed against the facts: drought or flood, heat or cold, everything confirms it. A hypothesis compatible with any evidence may be many things. Science is not one of them.
It is faith. And faith has earthly uses.
The first is to shut down argument. In secular politics, whoever dissents supplies information. In a religion, whoever dissents sins, and the sinner is not answered but anathematized as a denier.
The second use is more lucrative: exemption from responsibility. If the disaster is caused by the climate, no manager is at fault. The blame falls not on the officials who left the works undone, but on climatic fate, an angry deity that punishes without letting its priests be called to account. It is an administrative theodicy: the more terrible the god, the more absolved the official.
It would be a mistake to blame only politicians. Like every liturgy, this one answers our own demand. Ritual is visible, cheap and immediate; management is invisible, costly and slow to pay. Thinking is arduous, believing comfortable. And politicians serve that demand gladly: banning is free, but so is not clearing the brush, not dredging the channels, not building reservoirs. Sacralization turns budgetary neglect into theological virtue: the official escapes the cost of maintenance and collects the moral standing of the protector. Few doctrines have aligned fiscal sloth with sanctity so neatly.
Spain is where the mechanism is on display right now. More than 393,000 hectares burned in 2025, nearly a million acres and the worst record since 1994, and this summer is running well ahead of that pace. The official response, a great national pact against fires, confirms the preference for ritual.
The proximate cause is heat and wind. The structural cause is decades of neglect, as fuel accumulated in hills that rural depopulation had left without their old managers and environmental rules without maintenance. A 2022 waste law, offspring of the European circular economy, banned the burning of plant residues. Much of the range now on fire is protected under the European Union’s Natura 2000 network, where clearing, firebreaks and prescribed burns require prior authorization. The same faith granted the Iberian wolf strict protection in 2021, accelerating the retreat of extensive grazing, precisely the practice that cleaned the hills without costing a euro. California has rehearsed the same play for longer, with prescribed burns strangled by permits and litigation.
To sacralize a forest is to hand it to the fire.
Water tells the same story. Hydraulic engineering, once the pride of generations of engineers, became a sin: rivers are now renaturalized, the current word for leaving them alone. The flood that struck Valencia in October 2024 left 229 dead, a criminal investigation, and evidence that the ministry had frozen 228 million euros of retention works that would have blunted the surge. Nobody has resigned for failing to build. Omission leaves no fingerprints, and climatic fate carries the blame.
The energy case is the most revealing, because there the religion fails on its own terms. Suppose decarbonization were the only valid objective. The rational course would be to correct the intermittency of renewables, storing the midday sun for the evening through pumped hydro. Yet Spain has only some 6 gigawatts of pumped storage, with dozens of private projects stuck in a permitting system where everyone holds the right to block and nobody the right to build. Meanwhile the nuclear shutdown calendar stands, beginning with Almaraz: the regulator has just endorsed an extension to 2030, but the decision sleeps in a ministry drawer, though closure would raise both emissions and prices. The blackout of April 2025 had already put the bill in plain view. Germany, which shut its last reactors in 2023 and leaned on coal and gas to cover the gap, offers the finished version of the experiment.
The incoherence is liturgical, not technical: the reservoir floods a valley and the nuclear plant profanes the dogma, so both fall outside the cult even when they serve its god. Ritual demands pain, not solutions.
The vocabulary itself gives the liturgy away: storms are now baptized, like the thunder gods of ancient pantheons.
The climate only supplies the multiplier. We supply the base. Land burns where the hills are most abandoned, not where it is hottest; it floods where the channel is occupied and the works undone, not where it rains most.
And if the climate really is worsening, clearing, damming and storing become more urgent, not less. Whoever accepts the climate premise and rejects local adaptation is not defending the environment. He is defending the monopoly of the ritual.
The religion has a twisted moral economy too. Companies buy regulatory indulgences in the form of sustainability reports that correlate poorly with their conduct. Which is why simplifying those directives, the course Brussels has now chosen, is not enough. They should be repealed.
The faithful, for their part, pay for their identity at the ballot box. Indulgences and identity come cheap; dissent is the only expensive item. That is where the deepest damage lies, the epistemic one: without tolerated heretics there is no falsification, without falsification no correction of error, and a politics that cannot be wrong is a politics that cannot learn. Nature long ago entered that moral circle where costs and benefits may not be weighed. Nature stayed inside. We are being left outside.
Whoever sacralizes nature ends up burning it; whoever turns the climate into a god ends up using it as an alibi. The best service we could render the environment today would be to secularize it: to bring it down from the altar to the budget, from ritual to calculation, from dogma to maintenance. Forests do not ask for faith. They ask for clearing.
Adapted from “Arder por devoción,” The Objective, July 26, 2026.*
Translated by Claude (Anthropic) from the Spanish original.